Drawing upon the insights of Rabindranath Tagore, who coined the term viswasahitya to express his own understanding of comparative literature, this essay resituates translation as the cornerstone for new directions in world literature. While conventional understandings of world literature tend to reconfirm existing power structures and hierarchies, translation opens up the possibility of thinking beyond the national/global binary by interrogating the lines along which such binaries are conceptualized. Translation operates at the borders that are seen to divide cultures, languages, worldviews and geographies. This essay explores the dynamic relationship between translation and world literature within contemporary South Asian writing, through an analysis of heteroglossia, multilingualism and ‘translatedness’ in selected texts by Mahasweta Devi and Amitav Ghosh, opening up larger questions about multilingualism and also about the very discipline of comparative literature. Highlighting the role that translation has historically played in shaping power relations in the world, this paper projects the transformative potential of translation as the key to a radical reconceptualization of a world literature for the future.

借鉴Rabindranath Tagore的见解，他创造了viswasahitya一词为了表达自己对比较文学的理解，本文将翻译作为世界文学新方向的基石。对世界文学的传统理解倾向于重新确认现有的权力结构和等级制度，而翻译则通过质疑将其二进制化的思路，开辟了超越国家/全球二进制制度进行思考的可能性。翻译在跨文化，语言，世界观和地理区域划分的边界进行。本文通过分析Mahasweta Devi和Amitav Ghosh在选定文本中的杂语，多语种和“翻译性”，探讨当代南亚写作中翻译与世界文学之间的动态关系，提出了关于多种语言以及比较文学的学科的更大问题。强调翻译历史上在塑造世界权力关系中所发挥的作用，本文将翻译的变革潜力作为未来对世界文学进行彻底重新概念化的关键。